Server Migration: Significance and Precautions

The main intention behind the launching of a website is to introduce a company and its services to the worldwide customers, through the wide landscape of Internet. It enables in building a brand much faster and reaching customers in a cost effective manner. It saves huge investments required for non-focussed advertising and manpower required for direct marketing techniques such as client visits, cold calling etc. The direct marketing methods are more effective in the long run, but they would take a longer time to build a brand, and it requires heavy effort. The potential customers often prefer to give a cold shoulder to unsolicited sales visits, which makes the conversions difficult. Also sending a mail or giving a call to know about the Company’s services is also a time demanding exercise. However, an informed and impressively designed website creates an instant attraction to the prospective clients, which triples the possibility of the prospective customer to become a regular customer. Hence, it is imperative for the company to ensure that the website is well equipped at all times to deliver the finest impression on the customers. .

In order to maintain the optimum performance of the website, it is always recommended to monitor the loading time and tweak the website specifications accordingly. Majority of the issues can be resolved at the coding part itself. Optimization techniques like image compressions, avoiding of redirection loops etc. play a key role in reducing the loading time, and increasing the performance of the website.

When the hosting server encounters severe issues and when the migration to a higher level server becomes inevitable it is recommended to consider the following factors.

Choosing a higher server configuration incurs extra expenses. This will become useless if the issues on the website are not detected and rectified. So the first step is to locate where the problem actually lies. It can be done by consulting a reputed website developer and performing a detailed check on the website. The issues should be coordinated with the server side technical team so that they can use the suggestions from the web development team to rectify the issues. Often the hosting providers and the web developers blame each other for the issue. However, it is always better to coordinate with both of them to find the actual reason for the same.

Once the issue with the hosting package is confirmed and if the current host is incapable to fix the same, then the next step is to find a better hosting package as an alternative to the current hosting package. In most cases, the same Datacenter provider would be able to offer an upgraded hosting package with the same OS platform and compatible configurations. A change of datacenter provider should be considered only if the support provided by them is not up to the mark. It is important to choose a reputed Data Center provider who provides friendly support, accessible 24×7 and most importantly having in-house support staff in DC.

The next step is to filter the hosting package and prepare for data migration. In this stage, it needs to be ensured that only the necessary data and backups are available under the hosting package. In the next stage, the new hosting package needs to be purchased. Once the package is active, then data migration can be initiated. Most of the hosting providers provide free Data migration from the existing package to the newly purchased package. Both the old and new packages need to remain active until the migration is successfully completed. The backup, which we kept will come in handy at this stage, in case the package gets suspended in the meantime.

After the migration, the DNS of the websites can be updated for the domains to start resolving from the new server. However, it needs to be updated only after ensuring that all the required contents are migrated properly. Also, the DNS updation should be done only during the off-peak hours, and the customers should be notified about the DNS propagation delay for 2-6 hours due to the change in DNS. A properly done migration would ensure that the performance issues due to the server side reasons are mitigated to a good extend.

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